ROAMing Terrain: Real-time Optimally Adapting Meshes

Abstract

Terrain visualization is a difficult problem for applications requiring accurate images of large datasets at high frame rates, such as flight simulation and ground-based aircraft testing using synthetic sensor stimulation. On current graphics hardware, the problem is to main-tain dynamic, view-dependent triangle meshes and texture maps that produce good images at the required frame rate. We present an algorithm for constructing triangle meshes that optimizes flexible view-dependent error metrics, produces guaranteed error bounds, achieves specified triangle counts directly, and uses frame-to-frame coherence to operate at high frame rates for thousands of triangles per frame. Our method, dubbed Real-time Optimally Adapting Meshes (ROAM), uses two priority queues to drive split and merge op-erations that maintain continuous triangulations built from pre-processed bintree triangles. We introduce two additional perfor-mance optimizations: incremental triangle stripping and priority-computation deferral lists. ROAM execution time is proportionate to the number of triangle changes per frame, which is typically a few percent of the output mesh size, hence ROAM performance is insensitive to the resolution and extent of the input terrain. Dynamic terrain and simple vertex morphing are supported.

The authors' abstract, as published at the source., 2014 · DOI ↗